This cockroach-like existence is cumulatively intolerable even though on any given night it is perfectly manageable. “Cockroach” is of course an allusion to Kafka’s Metamorphosis, in which the protagonist wakes up one morning to discover that he has been transformed into an insect. The point of the story is as much the responses and incomprehension of his family as it is the account of his own sensations, and it is hard to resist the thought that even the best-meaning and most generously thoughtful friend or relative cannot hope to understand the sense of isolation and imprisonment that this disease imposes upon its victims.
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TJ
Tony Judt
Historian and essayist
United Kingdom · 1948–2010
Arts and letters
About
Historian of twentieth-century Europe, author of Postwar and founding director of the Remarque Institute at New York University. Diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in September 2008 and effectively quadriplegic within a year, he dictated a sequence of memoir essays for the New York Review of Books and gave a small number of interviews before his death in August 2010.
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